Conventional robotics applications in industry are many and well known. Most are dedicated to a single specific type highly repetitive work such as spot welding, spray painting, loading and unloading. Other uses for robots are light processing tasks such as, for example, deburring, drilling, or tapping. Each of these robotics applications may be operated in accordance with computer programmed patterns. In assembly or processing work robots are used as a dedicated part of an inflexible system operating on high volumes of identical or family related subassemblies. To utilize a given robot for more than one application is, generally speaking, an uneconomical operation because a great deal of manpower and machine downtime are associated with application change-over or set-up.
Surveys have determined that more than two thirds of all human effort expended in manufacturing is expended in dealing with batches of work comprising fifty pieces or fewer. Those skilled in the art of robotics do not generally expect a robot to operate at a throughput rate significantly higher than 150% of the human rate for the same assembly work. For low volume, small lot assembly or processing, the time, effort and cost spent in setting up and changing over the tools, parts and so forth from one assembly task to the next could easily exceed the higher throughput and other benefits of automating that task. Further, human operator controlled set-up/change-over time represents lost productivity and lost utilization of capital assets. Also to be considered is the hazard to the operator associated with performing that set-up/change-over within the work envelope of the robot.